Someone is attacking government websites, and a new anonymous hacking group is taking credit

State governments, beware: .gov websites are being targeted by a
seemingly new hacker group.

Last Monday the central
internet portal controlling all of Maine’s government websites
went down for
about three hours, due to a series of distributed denial of
service (DDoS) attacks. On Tuesday Maine.gov went down again,
this time only for two hours.

A hacking group called
Vikingdom2015 took credit for the attack on Twitter. Using the
hashtag “#OpAmericanGov” the Twitter account claimed that both
Maine.gov and VisitNH.gov were offline.

All we know about Vikingdom2015 is from its Twitter presence.
This group, or perhaps just a lone individual, writes tweets
about hacked websites and has it out for US government websites.
According to the Twitter bio, Vikingdom2015 hails from Russia and
proclaims itself to be “Hackers Government.” On Wednesday,
however, the account did tweet “LOL WE AREN’T FROM RUSSIA.”

The group has a formal list of potential victims. Two days ago
Vikingdom2015 released a
document on Pastebin enumerating its “Target List.” On it are
44 .gov websites — each domains for specific states — including
mass.gov, nyc.gov, and texas.gov.

Vikingdom2015 also links to a SoundCloud page,
which contains one ominous track about its plans. With
techno-keyboard tracks in the background a computerized voice
says, “Hello. We are Vikingdom2015, a
hacking crew, and we uploaded this track so we can warn American
citizens. We will knock all American governments’ websites
offline. We do not care if we get caught. We all like doing this.
So you better be prepared for the battle.”

The group has been actively tweeting for the last two weeks. It
took credit for numerous site outages, including OKC.gov,
which went down two days in a row beginning March 18.

But, many of its hacking claims remain unverified. One of the
group’s notable claims was that it took down the video game
streaming site Twitch on March 18. On Monday, Twitch notified its
users that its servers had been compromised and instructed people
to change their passwords. It’s highly unlikely, however, that
Vikingdom2015 had anything to do with the Twitch breach.

Beyond that, Vikingdom2015 hasn’t revealed any more details about
itself, or which sites will be targeted next. The account will
probably continue childishly taunting Twitter users and claiming
credit for DDoS attacks. In the last hour it got into a Twitter
spat with the Bangor, Maine Fox affiliate WFVX. As of this
posting, WFVX’s website has been offline.